Tinter-Shader and Excel Themes for charts

I've been doing some work on designing Excel themes geared towards chart design (which can save a chunk of time later on when designing charts and chart templates), so wanted to give a shout out to Color Tinter-Shader, a free online tool that I've found really useful this week.


Give Color Tinter-Shader a hexadecimal colour value (e.g. #008080 as in one of the examples below) and it'll give you back shades and tints based on the colour you entered.  Love the shades . . .

Shades add black to the selected base colour; tints add white.

If you're using Color Tinter-Shader to make Excel themes, you'll then need to convert the hexadecimal values to RGB or HSL.  There's no shortage of colour converter tools out there: Colorizer will do any conversion you need (and has some useful information about different colour models).  Colorrrs does quick conversions between hex and RGB (and shows you what a great big block of your chosen colour looks like).

A couple of quick tips for picking tints and shades for Excel Themes:

• Don't pick adjacent tints and shades. To make your charts easy to use, you need colours that are immediately distinguishable from each other.
• If you plan on using a consistent colour for text overlays (e.g. data labels) across all your charts, don't include both very light tints and very dark shades in a single theme (dark grey text, for example, will show up fine against a light tint, but not so well against a dark shade). 

Yes - these points are somewhat contradictory: a lot of the art in chart design is in finding workable compromises.

More on designing Excel Themes for charting later . . .